Thomas Pascoe worked in both the Lloyd's of London insurance market and in corporate finance before joining the Telegraph. He writes about the financial markets. His email is thomas.pascoe@telegraph.co.uk and his Twitter address is @PascoeTelegraph

Public morality is in chaos, yet voters crave order

We live in an ordered universe, which makes it harder for us to accept the chaotic state of our relations with one another

For almost a week, Westminster and the commentariat has tied itself into knots attempting to answer the question of what it is that Ukip voters want. It is an open question with many answers, from Europe to grammar schools to the fact that it is led by a lovable rogue rather than a plump social nihilist. Today's Times (£) article by Rachel Sylvester, one of the most perceptive political commentators out there, gives a summary of the view from the Westminster Village:

What Ukip offers is nostalgia. It holds out the prospect of returning to the Britain of the 1950s (when the country was whiter and less relaxed about homosexuality)… It is a fantasy, of course, in an age of globalisation and Google. But there is no doubt that this message resonates in an island nation, particularly in a recession.

There is a great deal of truth in this, but not in the sense that is being implied. A vote for Ukip last week was not a vote against black people, or homosexuals, or any of the other things which the centre and Left imagine the Right spend their time fretting about. I simply do not believe that many people engaged in the election of town councillors in the rural English shires decided to change their vote on the hunch that Nigel Farage has strong opinions on the appropriate placement of the male member.

What happened last week was deeper than that: Britain voted for order.

We live in a monumentally chaotic world. This is not for want of regulation and laws; indeed the proliferation of both is symptomatic of a world increasingly beyond our comprehension. The world never recovered from the First World War. Since the Armistice was signed, successive generations have grown up to find (in F Scott Fitzgerald's words) "all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken".

Our civilisation is, mercifully, one based on ideas not artillery. The ideas on which we have built the foundations of modern life are fleeting, transient, and insincere. I doubt one person in five subscribes to the view that all religions are of equal value (and therefore of none), the genders of identical suitability for any and every task, parenting arrangements of the same merit irrespective of the number of participants: yet we are required to concede that we are wrong, by Act of Parliament.

A middle-aged person has lived in a Britain will have seen over the scope of his life homosexuality banned, then tolerated, then celebrated. Women have been castigated for wanting to work, and then for wanting to raise children instead. In the 1960s 362,000 people got divorced; in the 2000s it was 1.4m. Socialism has gone from meaning the ownership of the means of production by workers, to meaning intense relaxation about the most sustained period of capitalist greed in history, to meaning nothing at all. Conservatism has become a radical philosophy. What we have experienced is a moral revolution, comparable in speed only to the technological change which has been raging since the Industrial Revolution.

Set against this change is the finite and relatively fixed aspect of human nature. The constituent parts of an enjoyable life in 2013 are identical to those required for an enjoyable life in 1013 – warmth, a house of your own, food, drink, love, peace in your relationship with God, physically challenging work, and a mixture of conversation and quiet.

The moral revolution has made much of this prospectus more distant. Hearth and home are harder to come by, given the death of the idea that financial reward should be tied to the production of something useful. Asset price inflation is a consequence of deciding that the money supply is not a moral issue; that too makes it harder to live. Our lives are too noisy, particularly where people live closest together in the cities. The sexual revolution has increased our stock of temporary pleasures at the expense of a more enduring one – for what it's worth, my impression is that both sexes see too much too young and become hardened by it. Young women do not fear the social stigma of a one-night stand any more, but they do fear the vulnerability of love, and that's sad.

Where do Ukip come into this? Well, they embody a deep desire for some fixity in life – time for the new order to embed itself, space for people to adapt. The range of examples I have given should make it explicit that moral change can be both necessary and good. It still needs time to take root before the next sweeping change, however. The Tory party used to ensure this happened, but it is now as devoted as Labour to social radicalism. A vote for Ukip was a vote for a party whose policies seek to sustain a moral order which is dying but not yet dead. It was a vote which spoke of exasperation at the pace of change and the drive and desire of the main party leaders to keep tinkering.

It's interesting how differently the world appears as time slips away. About five years ago I remember encountering the teleological argument for belief in God while at university. It seemed hopeless to me as a formal proof, but as the year's go by, I have had to rethink that. The need for order dwells deep in the heart of men, and civilisation is nothing if not the desire to impose order on the world. That desire separates us from animals, and we do not adjust well to long periods of sustained and deliberately induced chaos in our social relations. I suspect what most people want from a government is a period of placid inactivity. Heaven knows, we need it.